Swati Narayan’s ‘Unequal’: Why Bangladesh and Nepal fare better

Aunindyo Chakravarty

ThiS is a book full of data, and there’s always a danger that such a book might get mired in technical jargon, graphs, and percentages. Swati Narayan skillfully avoids that trap. She tells us a story through the everyday lives, struggles and triumphs of actual human beings. The data is right there, holding up the truth of what she is saying, but it never comes in the way of the human story.

If this book does nothing else, it will rid you of prejudices that you might have about Bangladesh and Nepal. You must have come across headlines in the past couple of years, about how these two nations have outstripped us in key human development indicators. Perhaps, like me, you took this data with a pinch of salt. Swati Narayan’s painstaking fieldwork in remote villages in Nepal and Bangladesh brings these numbers to life.

The book will shake readers out of their cosy beliefs about superior living conditions in India. Take the anecdote of the author’s encounter with Bangladeshi men at the international border along West Bengal. When Narayan asked them whether they noticed any contrasts with their fellow Bengalis across the border, they laughed and said, ‘Every morning we still see Indians take a dump in the open fields.’

In fact, we learn that almost every home in the villages in Bangladesh and Nepal that the author surveyed had toilets. In comparable villages in Bihar that Narayan studied, less than one in seven homes had toilets. We also learn about the immensely better condition of village schools and health centres in the villages in Bangladesh and Nepal and the resulting outcomes in terms of health and education amongst children, compared to similar villages in Bihar.

Narayan asks the fundamental question — how is it possible for villages with similar income levels in Bangladesh and Nepal to have such significantly better human development standards than that in the Bihari villages? The primary factor seems to be the level of empowerment of women, and their participation in the economy, outside the home. The author found that women in Bangladeshi villages were much better educated, and a larger number had paid jobs, than their counterparts in Bihar. Breaking stereotypical notions, she found that Bangladeshi women were much more open about sexual health and contraception. Even though they were clearly living in a patriarchal world, these women appeared to have negotiated spaces of freedom for themselves within patriarchy.

The second important factor, according to the author, is that there was less rampant inequality in the villages she visited in Bangladesh and Nepal, compared to what she found in Bihar. Despite the commonality of caste-based differentiation in both Nepal and Bihar, Narayan found fewer instances of active discrimination in Nepali villages than in their counterparts on this side of the border. Similarly, in Bangladesh, she found a higher degree of community feeling amongst the people she met. Despite the wide income and wealth inequalities in Bangladesh, the urban middle classes were only one step removed from their rural past. This made them more likely to be empathetic towards the needs of other Bangladeshis than the local elites of Bihar for their poor.

To my mind, the third factor that Narayan mentions is the most interesting. That has to do with the impact of major political upheavals on social cohesion in Bangladesh and Nepal. She argues that the bloody struggle against West Pakistani dominance, and the war of liberation that followed, created strong bonds between the Bangladeshi people, transcending differences of class and social capital. The rapes and murders of women, and their organised response to it, helped women seize a modicum of power within society. Similarly, the long civil war between the Maoists and government forces in Nepal, which culminated in the establishment of electoral democracy in that country, also helped dissolve social differences.

This is perhaps where one could draw very different conclusions from what the author has. She admits that Bangladeshi electoral democracy is in a shambles. The last few elections have been questioned, not only by the country’s Opposition, but also by global experts. It is now widely termed an electoral autocracy. Yet, it is this autocracy which seems to be delivering on human development, women’s empowerment, and overall social equality. A similar case can be made for Nepal, with its endemic governmental instability. The question that sceptics might ask — what is the point of human development if human rights and freedom have to be given up for it?